Rewilding is the latest rage in conservation biology, and it is useful to have a discussion of how it might work and what might go wrong. I am reminded of a comment made many years ago by Buzz Holling at UBC in which he said, “do not take any action that cannot be undone”. The examples are classic – do not introduce rabbits to Australia if you can not reverse the process, do not introduce weasels and stoats to New Zealand if you cannot remove them later if they become pests, do not introduce cheatgrass to western USA grasslands and allow it to become an extremely invasive species. There are too many examples that you can find for every country on Earth. But now we approach the converse problem of re-introducing animals and plants that have gone extinct back into their original geographic range, the original notion of rewilding (Schulte to Bühne et al. 2022).
The first question could be to determine what ‘rewilding’ means, since it is a concept used in so many ways. As a general concept it can be thought of as repairing the Earth from the ravages imposed by humans over the last thousands of years. It appeals to our general belief that things were better in the ‘good old days’ with respect to conservation, and that all we have seen are losses of iconic species and the introduction of pests to new locations. But we need to approach rewilding with the principle that “the devil is in the details”, and the problems are triply difficult because they must engage support from ecologists over the science and the public over policies that affect different social groups like farmers and hunters. Rewilding may range from initiatives that range from “full rewilding” to ‘minimal rewilding’ (Pedersen et al. 2020). Rewilding has been focused to a large extent on large-bodied animals and particularly those species of herbivores and predators that are high in the food chain, typified by the reintroduction of wood bison back into the Yukon after they went extinct about 800 years ago (Boonstra et al. 2018). So the first problem is that the term “rewilding” can mean many different things.
Two major issues must be considered by conservation ecologists before a rewilding project is initiated. First, there should be a comprehensive understanding of the food web of the ecosystem that is to be changed. This is a non-trivial matter in that our understanding of the food webs of what we describe as our best-known ecosystems are woefully incomplete. At best we can do a boxes and arrows diagram without understanding the strength of the connections and the essential nature of many of the known linkages. The second major issue is how rewilding will deal with climate change (Bakker and Svenning, 2018). There is now an extensive literature on paleoecology, particularly in Europe and North America. The changes in climate and species distributions that flowed from the retreat of the glaciers some 10,000 years ago are documented as a reminder to all ecologists that ecosystems and communities are not permanent in time. Rewilding at the present has a time frame with less than necessary thought to future changes in climate. We make the gigantic assumption that we can recreate an ecosystem that existed sometime in the past, and without being very specific about how we might measure success or failure in restoring ecological integrity.
Pedersen et al. (2020) recognize 5 levels of rewilding of which the simplest is called “minimal rewilding” and the measure of success at this level is the “Potential of animal species to advance self-regulating biodiverse ecosystems” which I suggest to you is an impossible task to achieve in any feasible time frame less than 50-100 years, which is exactly the time scale the IPCC suggests for maximum climatic emergencies. We do not know what a ‘biodiverse ecosystem’ is since we do not know the boundaries of ecosystems under climate change, and we cannot measure what “natural population dynamics” is because we have so few long-term studies. Finally, at the best level for rewilding we cannot measure “natural species interaction networks” without much arm waving.
Where does this leave the empirical conservation ecologist (Hayward et al. 2019)? Rewilding appears to be more a public relations science than an empirical one. Conservation issues are immediate, and a full effort is needed to protect species and diagnose conservation problems of the day. Goshawks are declining in a large part of the boreal forest of North America, and no one knows exactly why. Caribou are a conservation issue of the first order in Canada, and they continue to decline despite good ecological understanding of the causes. The remedy of some conservation dilemmas like the caribou are clear, but the political and economic forces deny their implementation. As conservation biologists we are ever limited by public and governmental policies that favour exploitation of the land and jobs and money as the only things that matter. Simple rewilding on a small scale may be useful, but the losses we face are a whole Earth issue, and we need to address these more with traditional conservation actions and an increase in research to find out why many elements in our natural communities are declining with little or no understanding of the cause.
Bakker, E.S. and Svenning, J.-C. (2018). Trophic rewilding: impact on ecosystems under global change. Philosophical Transaction of the Royal Society B 373, 20170432. doi: 10.1098/rstb.2017.0432.
Boonstra, R., et al. (2018). Impact of rewilding, species introductions and climate change on the structure and function of the Yukon boreal forest ecosystem. Integrative Zoology 13, 123-138. doi: 10.1111/1749-4877.12288.
Hayward, M.W., et al. (2019). Reintroducing rewilding to restoration – Rejecting the search for novelty. Biological Conservation 233, 255-259. doi: 10.1016/j.biocon.2019.03.011.
Pedersen, P.B.M., Ejrnæs, R., Sandel, B., and Svenning, J.-C. (2020). Trophic rewilding advancement in Anthropogenically Impacted Landscapes (TRAAIL): A framework to link conventional conservation management and rewilding. Ambio 49, 231-244. doi: 10.1007/s13280-019-01192-z.
Schulte to Bühne, H., Pettorelli, N., and Hoffmann, M. (2022). The policy consequences of defining rewilding. Ambio 51, 93-102. doi: 10.1007/s13280-021-01560-8.
We agree that empirical data are needed to assess progress when attempting a rewilding program. Further, many rewilding programs suffer from not clearly stating their desired goals or outcomes, thereby neatly sidestepping the social and political issues you describe. In this open-access paper (Sinclair et al. 2018; Conservation Letters) we provide some case studies that demonstrate how an empirical approach to rewilding could work in practice, and we challenge conservation managers to clearly articulate their desired end state (i.e. their rewilding goals).
https://conbio.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/conl.12390
Ironically, the paper is titled ‘Predicting and assessing progress in the restoration of ecosystems’ because reviewers did not like the term ‘rewilding’.
Andrea – I had missed this paper, ironically because it did not come up when I searched for REWILDING. So it is good to point it out and we look forward to examples of rewilding studies that follow your important empirical approach. I worry that too many empirical conservation papers state a set of actions but there is no follow up that one can find to see if the goals were achieved. Thanks.
I agree that rewilding is a contested issue, as most of the issues in the conservation arenas. At the end, we are doing our best in those fronts we choose as priorities for ourselves. Could be more organized, but that’s the way the world works. What I mean: Some rewilding will be carried out, and we will never be sure if they were good or bad ideas, because this judgment is ethical and aesthetical, not scientific. Better if all the rewildling are respectful of people and acountable to society and science. From the scientific point of view I think that is not reasonable to expect that we must know in detail how the ecosystem works and the full consequences an action before starting. That’s not an issue about rewilding, but for all conservation issues. What will be the consequences of delaying an action? I choose the adaptive approach of establishing clever, negotiated, indicators, monitor them and adjust tactics on the process, accepting the fundamental uncertainties on politics, environment and knowledge. Maybe
I’m old school thinking – crisis, uncertainty, action, values.
Glad to have stumbled over this discussion. I have been noticing the rising prevalence of the term. Even that for some people it implies a closer connection to Indigenous communities.
One aspect I haven’t seen discussed, and that I find problematic, is the underlying assumption that links ‘wild’ to a sense of a pure past and Indigenous peoples are somehow part of that naturalized space. Ergo, rewilding brings us closer to an Indigenous past.
My own research here is on how our Indigenous ancestors actually were instrumental in shaping what present day eco-utopians that was ‘wild.’ From coastal cultivation of berry patches, forest groves of crab apples and hazelnuts, to clam gardens and stream scaping, the use of fire to clear underbrush, etc, etc, etc.
The idea of rewilding explicitly ignores or assumes the naturalizes absence of Indigenous peoples simply living gratuitously in the wild. That’s a big reason this practice at the very least needs a new name if not a total conceptual rethink.